A Case of You
by aufbau
Summary: First, Nothing. Then, a bright light, a face. Then… a whole world. Then the boy.


Something that I had played with for a little while in order to focus on imagery. Set right after Grimmjow's return(yeah I know I'm late to the party)

vvvvvv

I had been told once by a soft voice that nipped at the very edges of my memory that staring was rude. However, I was not one for politeness and I figured that all rules had exceptions, especially regarding situations such as this one. Actually, I don't think this rule was made with consideration of this certain situation.

"A trick."

The boy had barely whispered the words, barely opened his mouth. I heard him more clearly than I had heard anything else in the past couple years.

"Aizen's sword," He said, louder this time.

"It's the light, a quincy hallucination, a dream,"

He swallowed hard and stared right into me.

"Wishful thinking."

I tried to play off the heat in my chest and the tightness in the hollow of my stomach-a place that shouldn't even feel tight because it's a hole-and gave a smile I hoped came off as at least a little cocky. I was shell-shocked, but I had images to keep up.

However, I'll be damned if the boy wasn't just as, if not more exquisite than he was the day he left me to rot on the glistening white slab of sand that lived beneath the violent blue sky that was the world.

I stepped off the edge between this world and a precipice, walking through the sky until I stood in front of the boy. Our chests were a hair's width from touching. At this distance, I could have ripped his throat out and there would have been very little he could do about it.

My senses were working triple overtime and I could taste his sweat and shock on the back of my tongue. I saw the way his hands clenched and unclenched, how his eyes dilated as they tried to take all of me in. The way his hair rustled in the wind like cattails by the edge of a lake. Cattails, a lake, a sunset. That's another memory I have, one of the only ones left over from when I had a beating heart and no idea that there was life after death.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you that cats have nine lives?"

My voice sounded foreign when it slid off my tongue, when it picked its way through my teeth. It was like I wasn't there, but rather I was watching myself talk to the one person who was able to pull emotion I didn't know I had from the very depths of my being.

He made me want to have a soul, honestly. He made me want something other than the stringy mess of instinct and animalistic ferocity that held my body together. I didn't know if I wanted a soul or him half the time. Sometimes I thought it was both. Sometimes I had to lie to myself and say it was neither.

"You look older."

It was kind of a stupid thing to say, but words had never been my strong point. And he _did_ look older-not that he really looked his age before. Though his hair was a little longer and his build a little larger, his age showed the most in his eyes.

"You've been gone for a while." I couldn't read his expression.

"Yeah but not _that_ long. You look like you're twenty two or something, jeezus."

"I was barely sixteen when I last fought you, and I'm eighteen as of a few months ago."

If his eyes set me on fire before, they absolutely scorched me now. He must have stared at me for less than seven seconds and it felt like my ribs had been cooked, that my throat was clogged with ash.

It was the most alive and the closest to death I have felt since the last time we fought.

Scratching at my head and trying not to be overwhelmed by the fact that this kid set every cell of my body aflame, I looked up at the sky. At first glance it was identical to the mass of blue hanging in Las Noches, but oh God don't let anyone tell you that and try to convince you it's the truth. The sky there was hollow and empty, the clouds flat and pinned up like bugs. Here, even though we still weren't on Earth, the blue was a thousand different shades of cerulean and reflected the sun off each wisp of clouds. It felt like I was alive again.

Aizen tried convince us that the sky was supposed to be stiff and dead and a single shade of teal for eternity, to make us forget moonlight and living. He almost did. I almost became the mindless soldier he had wanted.

I wouldn't call the boy something that had changed everything. He was more like the straw that broke the camel's back, the small push I needed to wake up and want something more than what I had been made to crave.

"Keep aging like this and you'll look like you're forty by the time this blows over. That trademark scowl isn't doing you any good when it comes to wrinkles." My mouth moved on its own accord, filling in the gaps of conversation while the rest of me continued to take all of him in.

When the boy didn't answer, it opened again to say some other witty remark that never came out because the boy was gone, a rush of air in his place. I whipped around and saw a streak of orange in the corner of my eye.

In less than a fraction of a second I nearly twisted my ankle flying off the cracked ruins of God-knows-what part of the soul society at a dangerously high velocity. I caught up fast, but the boy managed to stay a few heartbeats ahead of me. He was always light on his feet. I had never given him credit for how well he moved.

"Gonna slow down anytime soon?" I shouted above the insane wind our bodies were causing.

He stopped so suddenly I had to flip in the air and skid to a stop. If we weren't standing on air, I would have left the craziest skid marks ever on whatever I landed on. The soles of my shoes were red-hot, almost literally.

I ambled up to the boy until I stood behind him with just enough space between us for him to turn and face me. I could see his freckles, small and pale and almost invisible to someone who didn't know they were there. I could see the flecks of gold in his eyes too. They weren't a straight brown like what everyone thought them to be. I could write a book on this boy's face and I haven't written a single word in millenia.

I was not prepared at all when he punched me.

There was no spiritual pressure behind it, so the worst it did was sting like hell. I staggered, holding the right side of my face and snarling at him. The boy definitely knew how to punch: all hips and muscle and the sharp bone of his front two knuckles.

"You're trying your luck soul reaper. Just because I'm not against you anymore doesn't mean I'm on your side."

I grabbed him by the folds of his uniform and prepared to give him a bruise that would smart for at least two days. He didn't seem fazed. I forgot that he could see right through my temper tantrums, that he had gained that skill a long time ago.

"Punched your mask thing,"

The boy held up his hand, knuckles stained red and the thin skin holding his bones together an ugly purple. He opened his ruined fingers and extended them out towards me, seeming like he was going to push them through my hair before retracting them and balling them into a fist at his side. He looked away when I tried to make eye contact.

"I'm sorry. I'm just pissed."

"If you're really mad at me, then fight me like man instead of sucker punching me in the face."

I drew my sword and he his and we began the fatal, savage dance that governed our lives. The boy's muscles flexed and twisted and I watched the way his eyes reflected the tint of my sword, how they flashed towards the wounds he left on me. We were both bloody in a matter of minutes, the boy's breaths coming out quick and fast and my heart pounding out of my chest.

Fighting him was a rush, a drug. Going out on his blade would probably be the only way I could find peace because it was the only way I could assure that the one killing me was stronger than anything I could ever hope to attain.

I dodged a couple killing blows and dashed the boy's sword off to one side, throwing my own sword away and moving in to once again grab his uniform's front folds. I felt his hands on my wrists as the faint noise of steel hitting concrete reached my ears. His skin was more calloused than before, the pads of his fingers speaking hard work and pain.

I knew he could have beaten me. Even with the time I had to improve, this boy would be greater than anything I could dream of. Either he wasn't who I thought he was(which was unlikely) or he knew that I would never be able to kill him, despite my repeated threats and hot blood. The boy could read me like a book.

"Are you still mad Kurosaki?"

He kissed me, long and hard and with all the passion and light that I had almost died trying to attain in Las Noches.

God, it was so good.

I suppose, in a sense, that Ichigo Kurosaki had ruined me. I was a malfunction in the assembly line, a robot that had accentially gained emotion like the ones in the movies. He had given me purpose, and at the same time robbed me of what I had been made to carry out.

"Call me by my real name."

He said the word name with a gentle lilt that lifted off the tip of his tongue and floated through the air.

I had missed his voice so, so much.

"Are you still mad, Ichigo?"

"Nah. I'm glad you lived, Grimmjow."


End file.
